Final Piece

The final piece also includes Live Action sections that are not 100% relevant to this module, they were mainly ideas for Final Major and exploring how a narrated stop motion piece would be created. For the pure stop motion parts of the shorts these are the timings 2:00 - 2:30 & 3:00 - 3:10.

Copyright

"The LEGO Trademarks may be used under certain Limited Circumstances on an Unofficial Web Site
The LEGO trademarks (but not the logo) may be used in a non-commercial manner to refer to LEGO products or elements which are shown or discussed on a web site, as long as the trademark is not unduly emphasized or used in a way that can lead an observer to mistakenly believe that the site is sponsored or authorized by the LEGO Group."

https://www.lego.com/en-gb/legal/legal-notice/fair-play

When looking at using LEGO I thought it would be a good idea to check the copyright laws for the use of LEGO and how it can be viewed on the internet, as I am not creating a commercial piece and I am not anywhere using the LEGO logo, I have taken from this part of the LEGO website that I can produce my project. 

Editing

These are stills from my editing of my stop motion footage.

One of the things I had to do during the edit was add more saturation to the footage as the camera had for some reason barely taken in any colour at all, I am unaware if this was my fault or is just the way the camera films but it was easily fixed with the Quick Colour Tool

The rest of the edit was simple enough, just putting footage together and adjusting any brightness issues, then adding the sounds and music in the right place.

Sounds & Music

For my stop-motion shorts I have decided to add sound effects and music. All sound recording will be done in co-operation with Dan Bolton. I will be adding voice lines also as I feel this will give clarity to the very loose story that I have created. Without the voice lines it will be very confusing as to what is going on because the limited movement possibilities, however it is not possible to have mouth movements without editing in a moving mouth. I believe that the stop-motion will be better without these mouths however as they will be distracting.

My Tests

This is the video of the test footage I took when practicing techniques and movements with the lego characters. The tests were mainly arm movements and walking to see how easy it was to achieve the effect and see which time lapse setting to set the camera to when moving the characters around. I found that sometimes it was often beneficial to let the camera take two frames before moving the character to ensure the movement looked fluid rather than jumpy.
I also did a test in this of using a cloth dinosaur in the shot, as this is not lego it is harder to create the movement as when released the dinosaur would move back to its original position rather than holding it, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to include this in the final piece.

Editing

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/3655129529/
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To edit this footage I have chosen to use Premiere rather than Avid as I am not an experienced editor and find this software easier to use. All I need it for is to sew the footage together and maybe add some basic effects and transitions.

Learning the Basics

This video and many other Youtube tutorials all gave very helpful tips for people starting off in the world of LEGO stop motion. From moving arms to walking to even possibly jumping, there is a lot of things you can do with LEGO.

Camera

For Stop Motion it is normal to use a stills camera, however to change up the technique a bit I am considering using the BMCC as it is a very high-quality camera and using the time lapse function in the camera I can take a frame every certain amount of time, giving me an opportunity to move the figures around before the next frame is taken. This is also for convenience as the footage will already be in video format and I will be able to watch the footage back in video form immediately after taking it rather than having to wait til editing to see the stills stringed together.
Of course this will present a time frame problem as I will have to ensure I have moved everything that needed to be moved within the time I have set myself as to not get caught in shot during the next frame, however this is a risk I am willing to take so I have the ability to watch the footage back as it is intended to be viewed straight away.

Example of Lego Stop Motion

This is a simple yet interesting stop motion animation which includes quite a bit of movement but none too complicated.

Which Material?

When creating stop motion it seems there are a few options in the way of material in which you can create your subjects, characters, and sets. The most famous are of course clay or plasticine as it is very adaptable and can be molded into a very large variety of shapes. Stop- Motion studios will often spend months designing the characters every facial expression and pose into clay as the possibilities are very wide. Despite this I have decided against using clay or plasticine for my own stop motion project as I find it is quite expensive if one wishes to use a large variety of colours and also because I lack experience in sculpting and modeling clay which will mean my stop motion would most likely look like a lot of messy blobs rather than actual characters.

Instead I found a cheaper and more efficient material for myself when browsing youtube for stop motion tutorials.
LEGO has taken off in the amateur stop motion world and there are many videos all over the likes of Youtube of people creating scenes with this brand of toy. It is not only already in shape and does not need to be sculpted or molded but also comes with pre-built characters with facial expressions. Although it could still be considered quite expensive I do already have access to some lego which I could use.
The main flaw with using lego is because it is plastic and pre-molded, the movement you can perform with these figures is more restricted than that of clay. The arms of the figures only move in one direction and a lego figures face cannot move at all.

Stop Motion

"The basic process of animation involves taking a photograph of your objects or characters, moving them slightly, and taking another photograph."
http://www.dragonframe.com/intro_to_stop_motion.php

Stop motion has been around for longer than a century, it consists of a sequence of still put together to create the illusion of a moving image and was often used before CGI was around to create magically moving objects or enormous creatures like the dinosaurs from the 1925 movie The Lost World. Moving into the 70’s though stop motion became more of a style than an effect and full shows and feature length films have been produced through the decades in stop motion. The British classic Wallace and Gromit comes to mind to most when stop motion is mentioned, in fact the production studio responsible for the crackers twosome has produced a whole host of stop-motion features including chicken run. For other Tim Burton may also come to mind as he has greatly increased the popularity of this style with movies such as Nightmare before Christmas.

The process can be very tedious but it mostly involves moving the characters or props a tiny amount at a time, then taking a still, then repeat however it is very interesting to me that this can in fact make a single moving image file from so many still images. Because of this I feel that creating a stop motion piece with small figures will compare nicely to using smallgantics.

Failure

Even though I managed to get the editing techniques as correct and accurate as I could with my skills the effect has more or less failed to establish. I believe this is mainly because the footage I shot did not completely fulfill the criteria it needed to in order to create the full effect. The footage was not at a high enough angle to the subject therefore even after adding the blur correctly it did not look miniature, although I believe it was shot at a good enough distance.

To further explore into Minor Project I have decided to film with actual miniatures in actual stop- motion to compare it to creating miniatures from life sized footage. 

Locations

For this project I will need to consider location carefully as there are very specific needs I need for my footage. It is essential to the effect that I can find places to film from that are higher than the subjects I choose and preferably I quite a distance from the subject. The subject will more preferably have to be a moving object to get the full effect from the time lapse movement such as people, cars or a train. Looking at other examples if the same effect I have seen that main street or junctions are good examples for this if you can film from a high enough building need the location.
So farI have decided to film the train station from a nearby higher part of land ir from the train bridge above the track near the station.

Editing

http://www.bristolfilmacademy.com/assets/
images/Adobe-After-Effects-CC.png

https://filmmakersmemory.files.wordpress.com/
2016/06/resolve.jpg?w=590&h=590&crop=1

To edit the footage that I will film for this project I have looked at two different editing software's that I have access to through university. I first looked for a program that could manipulate colour easily to add the over saturated effect that I needed. I then looked for the software's ability to easily add adjustable blur to footage. I found that although Da Vinci Resolve would be better for colour correcting and colour grading because that is one of its main uses, After Effects would be better for adding layers and manipulating the lense blur that I need, as well as having some basic colour manipulating abilities. I also found After Effects easier to use in general so I have decided to use this software to edit my project footage.

Camera

http://s3.amazonaws.com/cameralends-dev/items/images/
000/002/088/original/BMCC.PNG?1432224392

For this project I have decided to use the Black Magic Cinema Camera, not only because it is the best quality camera I have access to but also because for this project I would like to use a time lapse function to create the effect mentioned previously of a stop motion style. The BMCC has a built in time lapse function that can be set at a variety of intervals including frame and seconds, this will benefit the project as it means I will not have to remove frames in the edit, making it look a lot smoother.

Examples of Smallgantics

One of the only famous examples I could find of smallgantics is its use in the opening for BBC's Sherlock, in which it is used to show famous areas of London.

This is a good example of smallgantics that I found on YouTube while doing research, it looks at a wide variety of locations and achieves the effect very well.

The science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle#/
media/File:Scheimpflug.gif

The science behind this effect comes down to the depth of focus and how it is faked to change perspective. The technique creates a false depth of field around the subject with blur added in during post to create the illusion that the part in focus is tiny.
It uses the Scheimpflug Principle seen in the image, named after an Austrian army Captain 'Theodor Scheimpflug', which looks at the idea that if the subject plane is not parallel to the image plane, aka the camera is at a higher, then the image will only be in focus along a certain line.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/
d/dd/Z-buffer.jpg/220px-Z-buffer.jpg

The other science behind the technique of smallgantics is z-buffering or depth buffering that is applied through the blur effect. Z-buffering uses black and white matte areas to add or show depth of subjects inside 3D graphic rendering software. In the case of smallgantics editing you draw a black and white matte sequence around the object in the scene then assign the focus parameters.

Smallgantics Basics

http://bentimagelab.com/work/

The technique is a variation of the Tilt Shift technique in photography transferred onto moving image. This was first done by a company called Bent Image Lab who used it for a music video they were filming at the time. All they did was apply the same principles from the photography technique to the video footage which is achievable through various video editing software.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/44/07/ad/
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The basic principle is to take your shot from a high angle and from quite far away from the main subject of your shot. The high angle is essential to the effect as it makes the audience look down upon the subject as you would a miniature figure. The distance also helps add to the effect as it makes the subjects much smaller making it again more believable. A balance of high and distance is important to ensure the technique can be properly applied.

http://cdn.iphonephotographyschool.com/wp-content/
uploads/Tilt-Shift-iPhone-Photos-16.jpg

In post production the main thing to do is to add the lens blur effect or to create the out of focus parts of the shot. The blur saturates the whole shot minus the chosen subject and a small window around it that should create a blurred foreground and background, the non-blurred part of the shot will become the miniature.
To add to the effect it is also a good idea to saturate the colour of the shot more intensely to simulate a more of a painted look.
For moving image it is also often practiced to remove frames of the footage or film the footage as a time lapse to create and less fluid movement so it looks like anything moving within the frame is stop motion rather than live action.

Smallgantics

I found this interesting technique while looking through a list of interesting techniques for films and television. It is a combination of both how the footage is filmed and adding some effects to it in post production which will be interesting for me to try out as I am not an editor but would like to expand my knowledge to at least a basic ability to manipulate my own footage.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4095/4907371580_88124df6c2.jpg

Smallgantics creates the illusion the subjects inside the shot are miniatures, tiny versions of real life objects. I find this a very interesting and unusual effect and would like to try and achieve it.

Ideas

Ideas for minor project.

Minor Project

For minor project we have to think of an idea that will expand our skills into an area we have not before explored and that will provide us hopefully with some helpful ideas or skills for our final major project. We then must produce a video or physical object to present in a 20 to 30-minute presentation.